What I Think About When I Think About Art

Oblique Strategies

I love Brian Eno. Well, I don’t like everything he’s done, but I admire his body of work. I’d love to read his book (this one, A Year With Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno) but it’s quite pricey. I bought his music app for my iPod Touch called Bloom. I don’t usually go for ambient music, but I find the sounds this program creates are mesmerizing. You can add your own notes and the piece will continue to morph and add new notes and delete old ones. The interface, each time your finger touches the screen a dot of color appears, is lovely and entrancing.

The Oblique Strategies are statements intended to get you out of your rut, basically. Eno and painter Peter Schmidt developed it for “when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”

It’s on my list to print up my own set of cards (there are about 100) to consult when needed. The strategies from the third edition are here. I scrolled down to get a random one, which is “Once the search is in progress, something will be found.” Delightful and wise.